ZFS ZFS scrub as disk burn-in tool

gofer_touch

gofer_touch

After reading in depth about how ZFS scrub carries out its work, I wondered whether it could be a useful tool for "burning-in" new disks in much the same way we would use memtest for testing RAM?

For example, by setting up a test pool and then generating some random data to fill the pool. Afterwards, we could run zfs scrubs to detect potential disk issues before deployment. Has anyone experimented with this feature for similar purposes? This would ideally be used along with dd.
 
I've done several repeated scrubs after moving data from older disks on my desktop to newer disks. Between the re-sliver to writes to each new disk as I replaced one by one and 2 or 3 scrubs afterwards I was satisfied I didn't see any early symptoms of disk failure. There's probably a more robust process but that was good enough for my own personal use.
 
Thanks! This is quite informative. I had a hunch that the scrub, being quite thorough in what it does (as well as disk intensive), could be used in this way as an ad hoc burn-in tool.
 
Note: scrub only touches sectors of the disk that have data on them. It does not test blank/empty sectors of the disk. Running scrub on an 8 TB disk with only 100 MB of data on it won't be of much use.
 
Yes. Do keep in mind what phoenix mentioned. In my example this is my desktop with a new 1/3 full pool and I mainly cared about a stress test for damaged disks while shipping. Enough for me. Not enough if you are putting your company's bottom line on the line.
 
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